Daily Sacrifice, April 19 (6:5)
“Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts”— Isaiah 6:5.
A sudden realization of the holiness of God brought with it a sense of Isaiah’s own unfitness for the divine presence. He felt in his inmost being that he was defiled and unclean, even as, long years after, Peter the fisherman felt, when consciously in the presence of the Creator Incarnate (Luke 5:8), and as Job felt long before when a sense of the majesty of Jehovah burst upon his soul (Job 42:5, 6). It is always thus when one comes to such a recognition of the holiness, power, and majesty of God. Unclean lips come from an unclean heart, and this is part of our inheritance from Adam. Isaiah confessed his own sinfulness and that of all the people among whom he moved; “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23).
—Charles Wesley.